Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Wednesday April 30, 2014 @10:51AM
from the internet-people-taking-over-world dept.

New submitter Raystonn (1463901) writes "Bloomberg has announced the release of Bitcoin support in their trading terminals, used worldwide by over 320,000 trading professionals. The market makers of the world will now have instant access to immediate Bitcoin prices on an industry-standard trading platform. This places the virtual currency before the eyes of the movers and shakers of most of the world's money supply as they decide where to invest their USD holdings."

Huh? The value of Bitcoin is driven exclusively by speculation, it has no intrinsic real-world value. The professional speculators like Soros and the slime at Goldman/Sachs have no interest in controlling the supply of rice, corn, tin, or Bitcoin, their stock in trade is running up the price of something, then crashing its value, buying up supplies at the new value, running up the value again and then selling as it peaks and then crashes again. They have hundreds of billions of dollars to play with and

Bitcoin is a concept. It has no value. People can trade, arbitrage, wield, barter, or exchange for it.It still has no value.

Best fortune to all those making money with Bitcoin. For every one of you someone has lostan almost equal amount. (originally mined bitcoins loss value 0 but it grows exponentially).

And as for the holdback bitcoins created and untouched -- that's why bitcoin will NEVER be a currency."Oh we invented this so we kept some for ourselves." Yeah, do that. And doom the coin.

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Nothing has value unless there is a general consensus about it being valuable.Dollars are only pieces of paper that are no longer even backed by gold and that are valuable simply because everybody agrees they are valuable. If that consensus changes dollars become worthless. The same goes for commodities, you can build a huge stockpile of gold worth $100 million that everybody agrees is valuable until one day there is a super volcano eruption, civilization collapses and alluvasudden the general consensus on value shifts to your neighbours $1.000.000 (pre apocalypse value) stockpile of guns, ammo and canned food being way more valuable than your pile of gold.

Sigh, no it doesn't. About 5% to 10% of mined gold goes into manufacturing. The rest goes towards bullion or jewelry (which for most people is the same as bullion – a store of wealth). We could shut down every last gold mine and have enough in our reserves to meet manufacturing demands for centuries. The price of gold is determined by the “investors” in gold – not the manufactures.

If you want to tie your currency because they have manufacturing value, chose copper, chromium, nickel,

You are confusing a data entry in a ledger (bitcoin transactions in the Block Chain), and the Bitcoin Network, which enables efficient delivery of money from one place to another. The latter has value for the service it provides, and from the software, hardware, and user base it includes. Those don't need backing by anything else.

Is the software, hardware and efficient delivery of money service worth tens of billions of dollars in total? Not, in my opinion. But in an age where an SMS mobile app is worth $18 billion, my valuation may be wrong.

As an aside, since the ledger entry is intrinsic to bitcoins and ledger entries depend on previous transactions of a user, doesn't bitcoins seem terribly big brotherish since the ledger tracks every single transaction you make using bitcoins?

Just because the word scientology shares the first four letters of the word does not mean it is or ever was based on science. Regardless that's a troll argument since Scientology is a closed and secret system where as everything related to Bitcoin is publicly available for you to review if you are so inclined (or paranoid).

Of course it's a troll argument, sometimes they're just too obvious to resist:-)

What in the world is scientific about Bitcoin though? Just because something is documented doesn't make it science. Just because it uses mathematics doesn't make it science. I suppose one could make the argument that it might be a sociology experiment created by a guy who worked on classified military programs, but that's kind of dubious.

Nothing has value unless there is a general consensus about it being valuable. As per your quote, millions of people think bitcoin has value as well as about $6billion dollars of market cap. That's not including the massive push by venture capitalist.

Sounds to me like you're just playing a game of word masturbation here.

Sure, you can claim that the word "invest" is only supposed to indicate spending money on a tangible good of intrinsic value. But every day, millions of people use the term differently.

One could just as easily say that putting money anyplace where there's a relatively good chance of that money increasing is "investing". My retirement fund, for example, is based on holding a bunch of mutual funds -- assets which are no more tangible tha

Nothing has value unless there is a general consensus about it being valuable.Dollars are only pieces of paper that are no longer even backed by gold and that are valuable simply because everybody agrees they are valuable. If that consensus changes dollars become worthless.

Wrong. Dollars have value because the government, charged with the creation and enforcement of laws, says they do. If the consensus changes, it doesn't matter, they're still worth what the government says they are worth. That's what makes a dollar stable, as opposed to say a Bitcoin, which is worth whatever a consensus of people say it's worth (down to and including zero).

Dollars have value because the government, charged with the creation and enforcement of laws, says they do. If the consensus changes, it doesn't matter, they're still worth what the government says they are worth.

That will be really helpful when you go to the market and find that a gallon of milk costs $100. "What the government says they're worth" is meaningful only as long as the government has the goods you want to buy. Even if they tried to impose a price ceiling, the long-term result would simply be that no one would be willing to sell the goods at the mandated price. You can't legislate away the law of supply and demand.

You don't have to look far to see examples of government currencies which were devalued "do

How many of the Dollars that you personally use are actually printed on paper (well, cloth or plastic in most places)? Most of the Dollars in circulation exist in bank ledgers, created by depositing the money from loans that banks have issued. Backed by the asset value of the banks balance sheet.

With the price of houses falling in the US, and the FED panicking and buying so many bank assets at face value...

I always wonder what the vitriol against BitCoin comes from. I mean, its completely optional. You don't need to be involved at all. However from a technical viewpoint it is a very very clever system. I really don't understand why people get so upset. Is it because people are making money off of it?

Everybody who's against Bitcoin is mad because they didn't mine it in the early days.

I didn't invest in google in the early days either, but I don't hate them.

I hate bitcoin for a number of reason. The few that top the list:1) I hate the idea of having all of these computers working harder and harder, using more and more energy, and every day there being more miners setting up more computers, all of it in an unproductive pursuit of nothing but wealth. The energy wasted for no real societal gain makes it more socially useless than a marketing department for a law firm.

You didn't have to "invest" anything in the early days of Bitcoins either. You just ran a program that used your CPU, then later your GPU, to mine Bitcoins. Yes it cost you more on your electric power bill, but that cost vs the value of Bitcoin today is negligible.

1) I hate the idea of having all of these computers working harder and harder, using more and more energy, and every day there being more miners setting up more computers, all of it in an unproductive pursuit of nothing but wealth. The energy wasted for no real societal gain makes it more socially useless than a marketing department for a law firm.

A non-centralized, freely available to anyone with an Internet connection, digital currency is a huge gain for society. Miners insure the integrity of this system. It's not wasted energy if you value the idea behind it.

2) The price varies so wildly, but it's all based off of nothing. At least with stocks, you have company metrics and financials you can at least try to use to figure out where it's going. At least with national currencies, you can look at what the country is doing politically and financially to try and guess where the currency is going. With bithcoin, it's like it's decided by a magic eight ball...there is nothing you can base decisions on other than a random guess.

Bitcoin prices are driven by supply and demand. That's about as simple as economics gets. Just like gold or any other finite commodity, as long as it has value in the minds of people the price will go up in the long term because of the limited supply.

I see the stock values going up and down everyday without anything the company is doing being a cause for it. In fact, the times when there is a direct cause for the change in value of a stock coming from something the company did would be a very small percentage of the time. So to me, the stock market also seems completely artificial. Plus, with how much the traditional market is rigged and manipulated, the BitCoin market would be a safer bet.

Everybody who's against Bitcoin is mad because they didn't mine it in the early days.

I didn't invest in google in the early days either, but I don't hate them.

I hate bitcoin for a number of reason. The few that top the list:
1) I hate the idea of having all of these computers working harder and harder, using more and more energy, and every day there being more miners setting up more computers, all of it in an unproductive pursuit of nothing but wealth. The energy wasted for no real societal gain makes it more socially useless than a marketing department for a law firm.

2) The price varies so wildly, but it's all based off of nothing. At least with stocks, you have company metrics and financials you can at least try to use to figure out where it's going. At least with national currencies, you can look at what the country is doing politically and financially to try and guess where the currency is going. With bithcoin, it's like it's decided by a magic eight ball...there is nothing you can base decisions on other than a random guess.

Here's where we disagree. I don't believe fundamentals influence, in any way, exchange rates. What influences exchange rates is only expectations of future exchange rates. These are regularly very different from past experience. I speak from intense personal experience in Indonesia in 1999, when the rate of the local currency dropped from 2,500 to the dollar to more than 15,000 in a little more than a month.

Stock prices yes, exchange rates no -- they are solely based on subjective impressions of futur

Amen. I wish I would haven't missed the boat. It sounded stupid to me until I understood it. Then it all made sense. It's a shame people are so afraid of what they don't know, instead of just trying to learn something they can't grasp.

Everybody who's against Bitcoin is mad because they didn't mine it in the early days.

I didn't invest in beenie-babies or Miami real estate or any number of other tulip crazes and I don't regret missing them either. My life will happily go on without ever hearing another word about bitcoin. It serves no purpose that I care about. Spend your life worrying about opportunities missed and you'll live a very unhappy life.

That, or they have a clue. Hey, who am I to inject logic into your silly little reality.

The only people who think BitCoin is something useful are those who want its value to rise so they don't lose money. The only difference between it and any other generic commodity is that BitCoin actually has no usefulness beyond speculators wet dreams.

You say that it's "optional", but it's not. If you view it as a scam investment like Tulip Bulbs that can bankrupt people you warn people away from it in some vain attempt to save them before they are ruined by it. It's not optional because when friends and family are dupt into it, and loose their shirt it's going to hurt you even if you didn't personally invest one penny in it.

Frelling Libertardians have no concept of economy or community. Lost in their own little fantasy of independence and self sufficiency, they're utterly oblivious to the concept that what happens in the larger society will affect them whether they like it or not.

When Soros and the other currency speculator swine blow it up to a trillion dollars and convince all the 401k managers to invest, and then short it and collapse it to $1.15 it won't affect you? Let me guess, you thought the mortgage bubble wouldn't affect you because you didn't have a mortgage and weren't invested in them, right?

Unless you live in a shack in the mountains and grow your own food pretty much everything that happens everywhere on the planet is going to have an effect on you. I really don't u

One reason is fear. People who depend on a paycheck denominated in today's currency are afraid their pay and all their assets will be devalued if bitcoin replaces that currency. It's an irrational fear. There will be just as many opportunities to earn bitcoin as the alternatives it replaces. Things that have value (like houses) will still have value in a bitcoin economy.

The other thing is resistance to change. Lots of people don't like change.

It's pretty simple. It has nothing to do with not being involved, or energy efficiency, or anything like that.

It's the fact that the logic behind it, the whole "it's kinda like a gold standard" type BS, is wrong, and there is nothing, nothing, more likely to upset a geek than someone on the Internet being wrong. [xkcd.com]

Not if you're a Slashdot reader it's not. Unless you know of a way to block all the stupid Bitcoin stories? If so, please share.

I always wonder what the vitriol against BitCoin comes from... from a technical viewpoint it is a very very clever system. I really don't understand why people get so upset.

I get that it's a clever system, but that's not why it gets a story a day here. Bitcoin is billed as a world-changing grass-roots utopian revolution to create a new economy based around a "hard" currency. As a revolution, it's bad economics and worse politics. As a social movement, it's driven by for-profit right-wing propaganda originally designed to scare people into driving up t

We are against it because it can't grow or shink with the econmoic value it represents.There will only ever be about double the bitcoins available as there are now. If the world switched to bit coins now, their value would have to hyperinflate creating economic carnage. Those of us that can see that want to warn the rest not to participate.Bit coins are technologically clever but economically dumb.

If china is banning it and Big traders and investors are getting interested, it should tell you something. Just take a few minutes to learn how the protocol works before claiming it's worthless technology. It's worth the small effort, we're all tech savvy people here.

I seem to remember that the Silk Road 2 had Bitcoins stolen after some cracker visit and were putting on a plan for getting able to reimburse their customers.

That seems more respectable and responsible than the "we will not be able to continue paying top bonuses to our mismanagers unless the public bails us out" regular banks. The banks are acting like modern-day robber barons.

Reputation also can have a quantifiable value. For example, if Mallory's exchange has a reputation of $25,000 and Alice/Bob want to do a $30,000 exchange, it might be worth it for Mallory to destroy the reputation of his exchange for the $5000 gained by seizing the transaction.

Part of the reason is that instead of regulation (the "trust us, we are a bank and guaranteed"), reputation is critical to their business. So when SR2 had BitCoins stolen, it was cheaper to replace the lost currency than to lose the

Actually the vast majority of dealers are just addicts who started selling to people they knew to support their own habbit. That instantly makes them better than the majority of salesmen in the world since they are not only selling only to people who seek them out looking for their product, but sell a product that they themselves actually use.

In fact, if not for abusive prices that are the result of pieces of shit who think they can solve every solcial problem by banning the things they don't like and stick

Drug dealers? Who do you think has been feeding the stock market rise for the last two decades? It's the best and easiest way to launder a billion dollars at a time. Why do you think Charles Grassley made a personal visit to the FARC in Colombia when he was CEO of the NYSE, and then retired with the most enormous bonus of any executive in the Exchange's history? Why do you think US Treasury Secretaries leave "public service" to go lead the money laundering, err, 'private banking' divisions of the mega-banks?

It's an enormous amount of money that needs washing every year, around half of it from drug sales, the entire worldwide Bitcoin pseudo-economy couldn't even begin to touch it. This is just to make it easier for the currency speculators to play with.

Whoops, yeah, that's right. Had to go back and look it up, memory is going.

"I invite members of the FARC to visit the New York Stock Exchange so that they can get to know the market personally." . . . Grasso told reporters that he was bringing "a message of cooperation from U.S. financial services."

The 60,000+ merchants who accept bitcoin today would disagree. In fact, data from the Silk Road indictment and the bitcoin Block Chain show drugs were never more than 4% of total transactions. It was way more than 4% of *news stories*, because a drug marketplace grabs more eyeballs than paying for socks and sheets, or web hosting, but that's the mainstream media for you.